FULL 'This Week' Transcript for Nov.29, 2009

Nov. 29, 2009

Page 6 of 16

I think it's going to be -- you talked about the familiar rhetoric
-- it's going to be the Bush program, which is, as he used to say, as
the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down. He's going to say, as the
Afghans stand up, we'll stand down. Meaning we're there to train them
and get out.

Mr. Gibbs said at the White House, the press spokesman, we will not
be there nine more years.

The problem is, the Afghans know that. And they know that the
Taliban will be.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That is the problem. And let me bring Matthew Dowd
in here on this question, because the president has got to speak to many
different audiences on Tuesday night, and it seems on the one hand, he's
going to be arguing to the Afghans, the Taliban and the Pakistanis, we
are there to stay, while at the same time arguing to the American
public, no, we're going to go.

DOWD: He has got a really difficult problem because he's got an
international audience, as you say, that he's got to talk to, and also a
domestic audience that's already flipped on him from where he was at the
beginning of this presidency, when the majority of people supported what
he was doing in Afghanistan. Now the majority of people oppose what
he's doing in Afghanistan.

The interesting thing I find about this is that all of this thing
that people said he's putting all of this thought and decisiveness, he
basically -- it took him 94 days to reach the same decision George Bush
would have done. Exact same decision George Bush would have done
probably in two days, or three days, or a week.

(CROSSTALK)

ROBERTS: It took him a long time to come to the surge.

DOWD: No, to the realization that the military generals wanted to
do this, and that's what I think is his biggest problem, is the American
public has flipped on this, and now he's basically going to be
advocating a Bush policy that failed in the last administration.

ROBERTS: I think, though, in the interim, between the time that
McChrystal asked for this and Tuesday, that there's been a lot of heat.
They have used this period to put a lot of heat on Karzai's government.
And also that election, that peculiar election was going on in the
middle of all this. And then when that got solved, as oddly as it got
solved, they then were in there in full force to try to say, look, you
know, you want us to do this, but for us to do this, you have to do --
you have to improve.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And that is probably going to be what's most new in
the president's strategy, Dan, on Tuesday. What else, as you look at
it, because the president's going to have to argue that this is a brand
new strategy, that he's gotten something for this. What else should we
be looking for there?

SENOR: Whether or not he sets realistic expectations. The reality
is, even with this troop deployment, summer of 2010 is going to look
much worse in Afghanistan than summer of 2009. Casualties, American
casualties will go way up. The reality is, the fighting season, the
sort of kinetic fighting patterns by the Taliban are at their peak
between March and November. So that means -- and by the way, they're
doing a very slow timeline here. They're deploying about a brigade a
quarter. I mean, the Iraq surge was a brigade a month. So you talk to
the Iraqi commanders, they say one of the most powerful imports in the
Iraq deployment was within five months, you had five brigades on the
ground.